The pa­per fo­cuses on data of Cre­tan Turks liv­ing in Bo­drum (Αλικαρνασσό), a mar­itime city of Turkey op­po­site the Greek is­land of Kos. The case study pro­vides us with as­sorted con­clu­sions but the pre­sent ar­ti­cle fo­cuses on the mem­o­ries re­lated to mu­sic and an­a­lyzes the sort of songs that the Cre­tan Turks re­call in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions.

More specif­i­cally, we are in­ter­ested in the so­cial iden­tity of this so­cial group and the way it ap­pears in its pre­sent form through dif­fer­ent age groups and gen­er­a­tions. As Cre­tan Turks called this iden­tity “Cre­tan” (“κρητική”), we have re­searched when and how they use it. An im­por­tant con­fir­ma­tion is that these peo­ple choose to talk about an in­vented iden­tity which is as­so­ci­ated with the past and the event of the Pop­u­la­tion Ex­change of their an­ces­tors.

Con­cern­ing the songs Cre­tan Turks re­mem­ber, we un­der­stand that they are a blend of lin­guis­tic el­e­ments of Crete in the early 20th cen­tury, which have been trans­ferred from their an­ces­tors, and mu­si­cal mo­tifs, which have been added over the years, com­ing from the Greek is­lands.

Fi­nally, in the case study of Cre­tan Turks, there is a col­lec­tive mem­ory con­sist­ing of ideas and im­ages pro­duced in the pre­sent, and as a re­sult, this mem­ory is com­posed not only of mem­o­ries but also of new el­e­ments. Con­se­quently, the an­nounce­ment fo­cuses not only on sim­i­lar­i­ties in the Cre­tan iden­tity of the two places (Crete and Bo­drum), but also on the way they have been trans­formed by adding new, mod­ern el­e­ments. In fact, it is an at­tempt to high­light some as­pects of the in­vented tra­di­tions, such that of the Cre­tan Turks of Bo­drum, who in­sist on defin­ing them­selves as “Cre­tans”.